i read an article and press release a few months back saying gentoo was working on portage for OS X. with the native version of Qt, that could be a really awesome combination.

unfortunately, since the press release, i've heard nothing. i read about darwin ports and fink and gentoo combing efforts, but what is that supposed to mean? is there still going to be portage, or is there going to be one joint app written as a colaboration between the three?

i've never used the bsd port system (darwin ports) or the debian package system (fink), and would rather use portage, since i'm using that on my linux boxen already.

the collaboration project is called metapkg. the idea is to share the patches required to get things to compile in OS X, then each project will use their own package management.

the gentoo OS X effort has a mailing list. you can find a link to it from gentoo.org.

seems that only 1 person is sporadically working on the OS X port of portage. believe me, I'm impatiently looking forward to the day when I can dump fink_________________http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/ppc

I just bought myself a 12" Powerbook (for a great price, too!) and I'm looking forward to Gentoo/portage on OS X as well.

I found the info.. metapkg's website is http://www.metapkg.org (although it's down at the time I'm writing this post), and the mailing list is the "gentoo-osx" mailing list.

I would definitely like to help out, but I have no idea where to get started. Which Gentoo developers are working on this? (Gerk?)_________________McManus
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Linux user #267375 - http://counter.li.org

yup, I'm working on the -osx port. With the 1.4 release I was a little busy with the ppc port, but expect to see some progress real soon.

Until now all metapkg partners were in hybernation mode (panther release etc.), but we are preparing some nice things. Right now about 5 people help out on the port (about 5 now), gentoo will be available on osx and as up to date as the linux version. I've got some GLEPs regarding filesystem layouts (since Darwins layout differs from linux layout) etc ready to be proposed and hopefully approved on the next development meeting.

How about gentoo on MOL portaged to OSX? _________________Inspiron 4100 & Sun UltraAXe
Portage on Solaris|Dell Laptop Hacks
The way you feel about organized religion is the same way I feel about organized socialism.

I really don't see a big point in Gentoo on OSX as Panther comes with Darwin Ports preinstalled and preconfigured...it's pretty mature and has a TON of pkgs in it, so yet another pkg manager for OSX is kind of pointless at this point?

Also having done a lot of OSX compiling I can tell you it will be a big job to get all the stuff unified ... at least for now .. panther.. who knows what's going on since it's gcc 3.2 based

I hadn't heard darwinports came with panther. I suspected it would happen someday, since so many of the guys who work on darwinports are apple employees.

Still, I like portage! I know it inside and out. And I've tried darwinports. USE flags are at least one feature where portage is more advanced than darwinports. (it has something similar, but it's strictly per package, not global & automated).

The biggest disadvantage darwinports has is that if you want to upgrade a package, it first uninstalls the old version! so if something goes wrong while installing the new version, you're hosed. plus you can't use the old version while the new version is compiling.

I don't see why it will be a big deal to 'unify' things. i believe the only thing being shared is source code patches to allow things to compile? any app that fink or darwinports supports already has patches created for the source._________________http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/ppc

I hadn't heard darwinports came with panther. I suspected it would happen someday, since so many of the guys who work on darwinports are apple employees.

Still, I like portage! I know it inside and out. And I've tried darwinports. USE flags are at least one feature where portage is more advanced than darwinports. (it has something similar, but it's strictly per package, not global & automated).

The biggest disadvantage darwinports has is that if you want to upgrade a package, it first uninstalls the old version! so if something goes wrong while installing the new version, you're hosed. plus you can't use the old version while the new version is compiling.

I don't see why it will be a big deal to 'unify' things. i believe the only thing being shared is source code patches to allow things to compile? any app that fink or darwinports supports already has patches created for the source.

some rumors indicate that darwinports is no longer installed in the latest seeds. I'm not in a position to confirm that, Apple decides what is going to happen in the future.

I have ported Gentoo to panther 7B49 this week, a dmg compatible with both panther and earlier versions of OS X (jaguar>)will be available asap on the osx website osx.gentoo.org (which is currently being created)

Imho the big advantage about Gentoo on OS X is that gentoo is in fact a collection of install scripts. The same install scripts are available at the same time on OSX, linux as well as on other platforms. There are also some other benefits that will become clear when Panther GM has been released.